In the space of 24 hours I’ve discovered a fiction book and read it cover to cover twice, and it’s been interesting to say the least.
I’m going to be talking about Philip Pullman’s “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” I will warn you now that I’m just going to ramble on this, so spoilers will be inevitable, all though hopefully they will be at a minimum.
“Synopsersize Him!”
Ok, so, the book is a re-telling of the Jesus story, told for the large part from the perspective of Jesus’s twin brother who is named Christ. Jesus grows to be the passionate charismatic, preaching of the immanent arrival of Gods kingdom, and Christ grows up to be his secret biographer, persuaded from the shadows by a mysterious figure to re-shape events. He is to record them as “timeless truth” rather than factual history. Christ is lead to believe that the two are not the same things, and that Jesus’s message will be forgotten if its not exaggerated and institutionalised for the good of humanity.
The Good
First off, it’s very well written, short, sharp and basic, and so in a way it is poorly written – but on purpose! Imitating the tone and sometimes erratic form of the early gospels themselves, this is very smart and creative move as it also enables your to get through it in about 90 minutes.
Despite the purposefully clunky way the story is told the character of Christ feels surprisingly well formed and developed. And although we know very little about him, the mysterious Stranger that recruits Christ to document Jesus’s deeds is intriguing to the point that I was constantly guessing who he was and what were the real motives. Other characters sort of move in and out of the narrative with appropriate treatment fitting for a book pretending to be a gospel. i.e very little is said about them unless its to further a specific theological agenda (within the context of the story, not Pullman’s beliefs).
Pullman has clearly done a lot of research for this because it pulls from all over the apocrypha. Now this is intellectually meaty, and yet at the same time it will be the books major stumbling block. The author is using source material from outside of the canonical bible, and this I’m sure will lead many people to think that he’s just making shit up a la Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.
So ultimately to get the most out of this book you have to be a little biblically literate, and not just of the 27 books of the canon. He has drawn from many of the other early gospels, letters and traditions. This will be troubling and confusing for I guess if you know nothing of them, as they would be led to think he has just made stuff up for the sake of changing the well known “facts” of the Jesus story. But the truth is in using the non-canonical material this way he is making wry observation and commenting on the complex nature of myth development. The interior of the dust jacket even reads “Above all, this book is about how stories become stories”.
Frustratingly this will be lost because outside of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John and some Paul, people generally aren’t aware of the mass of variant views on who Jesus was, and what he supposedly said and did, which all exist within the first few centuries.
The Not So Good
The book is A5 size, hardback, large print, double spaced with large margins and despite being a compact 245 pages there is still a little fat in the book that didn’t seem to serve purpose. It seemed like elements were there just to tick all the traditional narrative boxes,they didn’t necessarily advance the story he was trying to tell. This doesn’t help the book scream great literature, but it does make it a very interesting statement in a different way.
Gethsemane
Jesus’s outpouring in the Garden of Gethsemane is truly moving and epic, yet at the same time falls flat on it’s face. This is a shame because taken out of context it is very moving, and is close in many regards to my own views. It is clearly channelling Pullman’s own, and it shows in the way he lets it run out of control. In the speech Jesus has clearly been having a crisis of faith, and in a protracted soliloquy he laments predictions of church corruption, child rape, that God is nowhere in the silence, and of “smart-arse philosophical priests” claiming Gods absence is the very evidence of his presence.
The problem is that this is not consistent with the character of Jesus so far. Up to this point we have been receiving information of Jesus’s nature either through Christ or his informant. And so far Jesus has been convinced of Gods love as a template for forgiveness and generosity, then seemingly out of nowhere, we get Jesus letting rip with what is essentially an atheistic monologue. Whilst it’s two thumbs up for the message, in context it makes little artistic sense.
Inconsistent reality
In the beginning of the book we have Christ actually working miracles to 2 come to mind, the dyers cloth colourings and the clay sparrows made flesh on the Sabbath, yet after this, all of Jesus’s “miracles” are rationally explained away as not really miracles, or left very ambiguous as to the nature of the outcome (thus Christ, the word of god, needing to massage the events to make them impressive).
Even the twins’s conception is very ambiguous. If you read the chapter quickly you can assume its just the same as Luke’s angel of the lord informing Mary she will give birth to the son of God. But read carefully I think the words were chosen specifically to give ambiguity. The angel appears as a man, in the exact form of one of the men in her village. He tells her “the lord wants this to happen at once” and that he has “come from him especially to bring it about.” It then says just one more sentence ”And that very night she conceived a child, just as the angel foretold” It doesn’t say how she conceived, there is nothing of the Holy Ghost coming upon her, the supposed angel doesn’t even tell Mary that the child will be the son of God (as in Luke), only that the lord wants her to have a baby! Now! There is no reason to believe that this was not just some opportunistic young lad in the village that wanted to have a go on Mary whilst Joseph was away. And appearing as an angel in the night to a devout god fearing teenage girl was the best way to go about it.
If this is the case and she believes that it really was an angel it doesn’t matter to Mary whether she had intercourse, because as far as she was concerned she was only doing what the lord wanted. As readers, we are left purposefully in the dark to wonder, I felt like this was one of the most intelligent chapters of the novel and the miracles of Christ later on confuse the nature of reality portrayed in the story by explicitly telling us that Christ performed supernatural acts.
The Stranger
Without doubt the most intriguing element of the book is the Stranger. Who is he? It is strongly alluded to that he is not human, but he explicitly states to Christ that he is not the Satan. The only reason this is in the “not so good” section, is that I wanted more of the stranger, this was left just a little too tantalizing, a few answers could have been hinted at.
So Pullman finishes the book with the answer to his identity left open, but finally closes with a superb last sentence that almost renders the identity issue moot. I am not going to spoil it here, but it really is poignant!
Conclusion
This is a very interesting read, and it just about stands as a piece of fiction without the reader needing to be aware of its subject and sources in detail. However any one who studies biblical history and the has an awareness of the non canonical books of Christian antiquity should find it an absolute treat. It has a lot to say about the nature of myth and how it is forged. This is attested to by the fantastic dust jacket cover, that on the back features just 4 words in massive font “This is a STORY.“
The presentation of the book plays into it imagining it’s self as a gospel/bible, with no description on the back except the above. There is no contents page and the ribbon page marker is an especially nice touch.
If this was the route Pullman was going for, I wish he would have gone hardcore and taken it further. For example not numbering the pages, not breaking up the chapters for visual clarity and left out the about the author from the interior of the jacket. Obviously the publishers would have something to say about this, but maybe they could be convinced of it as a clever marketing campaign.
It will be criticised though, some people will take offence (ridiculous!), some because of scholarly dispute (fine) and some will just not like it as a novel (that’s taste, and also fine). Finally some will criticise is out of ignorance, which is possibly the worst outcome in this case. Irrelevant criticisms will be levelled at it like “based on a false premise and events are made up” without knowing of the 1st to 4 century sources that it draws from. And in reality it’s based on a far more likely premise than that the razor precise laws of nature were routinely suspended for 33ish years in first century Palestine.
From the interviews that I’ve seen of Pullman in promoting this so far, he likes to get across that there are errors and inconsistencies within the standard gospels (the things that clearly show the gospels to be stories), and I think that larger point being made here will sadly be lost. He is decidedly not trying to disingenuously claim that Jesus had a twin brother, and he is also not inventing the idea. It’s a belief/tradition that goes back to the early days of the church(s) and the author of the Gospel of Thomas (perhaps Didymos Judas Thomas). Pullman is using it in part to show that it is just as unlikely as some natural events in the gospels (i.e empire wide census) and even less likely that the historical Jesus turned water in wine or rose from the dead.
The really clever thing about this book is that it is quite literally the most believable telling of the Jesus story. Containing almost all the elements of the well known tale without resorting to supernatural explanations (for 90% of the time). In doing this it also circumvents some of the most egregious internal inconsistencies that the Christian faith is forever bound by because t’s not tying itself in theological knots.
Check it owt!
dB
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I’ve been a big admirer of Sam Harris in recent years. His ideas can at times be controversial to both theist and atheist alike, yet he always remains lucid, calm and a strong advocate of rational thought.
